In 2021, you should be aware of the advantages of live chat.
Live chat has been shown to be a strong tool for businesses to communicate with customers time and time again. Indeed, live chat has progressed from a customer service channel to a dynamic platform for sales, marketing, and customer service. Businesses have hopped on the live chat bandwagon because it meets the demand for quick communication.
What are the advantages of using live chat?
Businesses all over the world are focused on providing a better customer experience rather than just responding to client requests. Businesses can now focus on the big picture thanks to the evolution of live chat. If you’re still thinking about using live chat as a team communication tool, you’re already behind the curve. But, because it’s better late than never, here are some live chat perks for your business to help you get started.
1. Real-time interaction with customers and prospects
Chat is quickly becoming one of the most important support solutions for businesses. This is due to the fact that live chat provides customers with real-time help. Customers despise being placed on hold or receiving delayed email responses. Customers have been able to resolve these issues thanks to live chat support. Your consumers may reach out to you instantly and get their questions answered with a chat widget placed on your website.
According to recent Freshworks research, chat and messaging were important in maintaining service levels during the crisis for 44% of customer service leaders. Live chat has become the most popular support channel due to its ease of use and convenience. Every guest is attended to with immediate responses. Instead of just providing support, you can use live chat to truly engage with all visitors.
2. Provide individualised, context-based assistance with real-time feedback
Customer service that is tailored to their needs is critical. It adds a personal touch, reduces customer effort, and boosts satisfaction levels when your help is contextual and delivers the best answer based on the current context of a customer’s previous contacts. According to a McKinsey analysis, one of the greatest hurdles to firms providing the best possible support is a lack of personalisation.
Client care representatives may examine purchase history, product details, and customer profiles on a single chat interface with live chat for business. Agents can adjust the customer’s experience based on this data. Unlike email assistance, personalisation occurs in real time, fostering a compassionate relationship with the customer. The ability of live chat to be asynchronous provides the customer with complete control over the interaction by allowing them to pick when they want to ask for help.
3. With proactive support, you can turn customer service into customer joy.
The majority of customer service is reactive, and customers are the ones that contact the support personnel to resolve their problems. Proactive support entails reaching out to consumers before they submit a ticket to give solutions or resolve their difficulties.
Customers want a greater support experience than merely answers to their concerns in today’s digital age. If the goal of your business is to produce happy and loyal consumers, proactive assistance should be your go-to strategy.
Setting up prompted messages allows you to deliver proactive communications to your website users. It’s also crucial to remember to communicate the correct trigger messages to your target audience. You can establish triggers for Votiko prompted messages based on the type of audience, their location, and their actions on your website. Proactive messaging, when utilised correctly, is a strong marketing tactic that increases customer happiness and develops brand champions for life.
4. Increase the number of sales and conversions
Did you know that more than half of clients are more likely to buy from a firm that provides live chat support? A website’s live chat help is comparable to a retail assistant. Customers frequently require assistance when making online purchases, and live chat provides them with an immediate way to contact a brand, ask questions that assist them in making a purchase decision, and, with the right integrations, provides access to payment portals, ticket booking apps, and much more. Perhaps that’s why 38% of customers stated they bought anything after just one chat session!
However, marketers may use live chat to reach out to website visitors and encourage them to make a purchase. How many times have you put products in your online shopping cart, then abandoned them or simply closed the page for whatever reason? Unfortunately, you’re not alone, which is bad news for businesses.
Cart abandonment is a huge problem in e-commerce, costing millions of dollars. Having a chat widget on your website indicates that you are available to help customers with any problems they may have when making a purchase. While some customers claim to be browsing, you can engage in proactive dialogue with those who are interested in your products or services. Reach out to them with the appropriate message to help them complete their purchase. This will assist you in reducing cart abandonment and increasing conversion rates.
5.Take control of more talks
Talking on the phone with a customer is the pinnacle of ‘unitasking’ for a customer care representative. There’s not much a support agent can do while on a call besides pull up a customer’s file, unless they put a consumer on hold.
However, with live chat for business, a single employee may manage multiple consumer inquiries at once. In the time it takes the first to react, they can simply ask a question in one live chat window and send a response to another. Let’s say your customer service representatives take an average of six minutes to respond to support calls. If each live conversation took six minutes, but each agent could manage two at once, that appears to be a decent deal:
With only 50 operators, SuprDaily, a subscription-based delivery service, processed 4000 chat messages every day. Their agents were able to handle many chat discussions at the same time using Votiko. Chat assisted them in scaling their support while also lowering their operational expenditures.
Live chat for business allows you to maximise the number of consumers your agents can assist while still providing immediate responses to them. Support teams will have fewer backlogs and will not need to expand their support teams as much as they would otherwise.
6. To increase agent productivity, set up canned responses and automation.
Canned responses: There are a few basic but powerful things you can do to help your chat staff succeed. Canned responses, for example, are pre-written templates of responses to common client questions. These could range from simple questions like “What time does your store open?” to more procedural, multi-step, yet repeating questions like “How do I return my purchase?”
Instead of having to rewrite these responses each time, agents should be able to quickly locate the appropriate response and transmit it. These prefabricated responses can still appear natural and unscripted with a little personalisation, while substantially boosting your agent’s response and resolution time.
Ticket auto-assignment: Support teams can save time by automatically assigning tickets to the appropriate agents. Agents are frequently separated into product or function-based teams, channel-based teams, or region-based teams in order to manage an efficient team. For example, depending on your product or service, you may build a team of agents dedicated solely to technical issues, live chat, or consumers based in the United States. Tickets raised on these parameters will be auto-assigned to the team most qualified to address them if the assignment rules are set up correctly. If we take it a step further, auto-assign can also look at the team’s workload and allocate it to the correct agent in a round-robin fashion or based on the agent’s current burden.
This prevents the agents from having to re-route consumers if they are connected to a different live chat agent, in addition to improving response time. Both users and agents benefit from this level of self-service.
After implementing Votiko, Klarna, a Swedish fintech startup, reduced their first response time to 60 seconds. They were able to auto-route tickets to the appropriate agent using IntelliAssign, and their customers did not have to wait long to be connected to the appropriate agent.
7. Gain a competitive advantage for your brand.
Even though live chat appears to be highly popular right now, many organisations have yet to offer live chat help to their clients. Only a bit more than 60% of organisations provide live chat assistance to their clients. Having outstanding live chat assistance gives you a competitive advantage. When a customer has a problem, they are more likely to use the help channel that is most convenient for them. Furthermore, in the event of a pandemic, firms are forced to switch digital and provide totally virtual customer service. Businesses that failed to address the needs of their customers in order to provide a better digital customer experience were unable to stay in business.
Use AI and integrations to get the most out of live chat.
With integration, live chat can reap even more benefits. Here’s how to do it.
Messaging apps: Right now, your customers are most likely “chatting” on messaging apps. Chat connects your company to billions of people who use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and other messaging apps. Customers will be able to start a conversation with you without having to visit your website thanks to live chat connections with messenger apps. However, these chat applications can be used for more than just help; they can also be utilised to proactively engage leads and visitors. Through low-touch and concise messaging, you can nurture distinct groups of visitors over time, making it a terrific channel for lean or budget-strapped companies.
Chatbots: Live chat and chatbots are the best combination ever. They work in tandem to improve your clients’ support experience. Chatbots can be installed on your chat software and can work wonders for your support team and your company as a whole.
Chatbots enable you to provide service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If it’s a complicated problem that requires human assistance, it can send the information to an agent during business hours, sparing you from losing leads and customers. This also saves you money on the cost of recruiting additional agents to provide service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Automate common questions: AI-enabled chatbots are well-equipped to answer all common questions. Freshworks’ Freddy bot, for example, leverages AI and machine learning to quickly answer popular questions with the most appropriate solutions. It learns from consumer interactions in order to provide a better customer experience and increase satisfaction ratings.
Customers don’t like chatbots that sound fully robotic, so they use intent-driven communications instead. Bots are capable of detecting customer intent and initiating meaningful dialogues with them, which can lead to conversions or simply increase engagement. Customers can be segmented based on their activity, and customised messages can be sent out ahead of time. To learn more about chatbots, go here.
Forms and scheduling: Most sales teams will tell you that obtaining leads to do a product demo is the most difficult part of converting them into clients. While websites are littered with lead forms and demo request links, persuading customers to use them is challenging. You can simply book appointments and organise demos with your prospects by integrating your live chat software with calendar tools like Google Calendar or Calendly. This frees up your sales team’s time to focus on demos rather than scheduling appointments.
Co-browsing: One of the most effective strategies for resolving complex technical issues for clients is co-browsing. Unlike phone assistance, co-browsing on live chat makes it even easier for consumers and agents to dig right into the issue without having to switch devices or screens. Integrating your live chat tool with a co-browsing software like Team Viewer aids in the speedy and successful resolution of consumer issues.
With live chat, you’ll be prepared for the future.
Live chat has been the quickest way for customers to reach teams since its debut. Even small businesses benefit from live chat because it provides clients with faster answers, helps support teams serve more customers, and optimises the entire support process. Customers expect immediate, individualised assistance, and live chat is well positioned to provide it.
Your teams will be able to tackle problems at a higher level with automation rather than delving into the details of each query. Whether you’re running a small business or a large corporation, it is a perfect fit for maximising the amount of time agents spend with customers without sacrificing the quality of service they receive. Don’t lose out on the chance to wow your consumers; try Votiko right now!
